An indepth examination of the controversy surrounding nuclear power

Tag Archives: industry

As I discussed in my previous post on the pro-nuclear movement, it is very hard to pin down who they are. I want to attempt, in my ‘major players’ discussion to create a balanced representation of who is important in this debate. The trouble is, unlike the anti-nuclear movement, there are no organisation that actively campaign for nuclear power, in the way that Greenpeace campaigns against it. There are many corporations, no doubt, that actively lobby for the use of nuclear power in many countries (probably most countries), but there are none with the same profile of Greenpeace that have the same activist leanings. This can be attributed to the fact that most developed nations have already got nuclear programs in place. So then, what is the job of NGOs that want to campaign for nuclear power?

Well, for the most part, it seems just to be advocacy. Although I briefly touched on them in a previous post, I am going to talk about the World Nuclear association (WNA), as they seem to be an equivalent body to Greenpeace, from the other side of the debate.

The WNA is an industry body that claims to have four main goals:

Coordinating industry cooperation

Representing the nuclear industry on the ‘world stage’

Providing reliable information on nuclear power

Providing leadership building and educational activities

For the second goal, the WNA associates closely with regulatory bodies, and makes and effort to represent the nuclear industry in the United Nations, especially on topics related to sustainable development and climate change.

It seems to me though, the area the public arm of the WNA is mostly focused on their third goal: providing reliable information. In their ‘Mission’ section, they elaborate on this to talk about how they are the world’s ‘most accessed’ source of information on nuclear power.

The WNA also has a good charter of ethics, which (I think) goes a long way to giving them a more respectable image than would be associated with other nuclear-based corporations. They aim to promote the safe, sustainable and peaceful use of nuclear power.

The only major problem I had was finding more information about it. Obviously, there is a lot on their own website, but there is little to be found outside of that. That may be because they are inoffensive as an organisation, and there just isn’t anything to find, or that they’re just very good at managing their search engine optimisation.